Bid to outlaw GPL

October 24 2002

Leaders of the New Democrat Coalition in the US Congress are seeking to have licenses such as those in the GNU and GPL outlawed on the grounds that they are "restrictive, preclude innovation, improvement, adoption and establishment of commercial IP rights."

In a letter to fellow members of their coalition, the three members of Congress leading the charge - Adam Smith,
Ron Kind and Jim Davis - claim that "the terms of restrictive license's (sic) - such as those in the GNU or GPL - prevent companies from adopting, improving, commercializing and deriving profits from the software by precluding companies from establishing commercial IP rights in any subsequent code."

The letter says: "Thus, if government R&D creates a security innovation under a restrictive license, a commercial vendor will not integrate that code into its software. So long as government research is not released under licensing terms that restrict commercialization, publicly funded research provides an important resource for the software industry."

Davis and Jim Turner, Ranking Member of the Reform Subcommittee on Technology, have drafted a letter to be sent to Richard Clarke, chairman of the President's Critical Infrastructure Board, expressing these sentiments, saying " it is essential that the National Strategy affirm federal tradition by explicitly rejecting licenses that would prevent or discourage commercial adoption of promising cyber security technologies developed through federal R&D."

Members of the coalition have been urged to sign the letter to show their support.